because I have seen an angel of the Lord face to face." The religious feeling-that which we have before the highest unknown--is the same compound: we are directed to fear God and love him.

In every case the feeling of awe is precedent to an imaginative employment of the mind. The boy's fancy is started and he peoples the cave or the wood with figures or presences, more or less distinct, beautiful or fearful, robbers, giants, or fairies. The awestruck lover sees not with the eye but with the mind, and beauty is enhanced or even created. The lover of nature proceeds to recreate nature.

From worlds not quickened by the sun

A portion of the gift is won.

The religious feeling draws down the same gift; the mood of reverent awe is that of religious ecstasy and vision.

Now let us see what the result is, of the employment of this second mode of thought, upon the half known subject with which it deals. The second operation of the mind, like the first, has the effect of bringing knowledge, of lightening the darkness, or the penumbra, as I have called it--but in a different way. It also discovers truth, what we call poetic truth. What does this mean? But in the first place there is no doubt that it does discover truth. There is a disposition in this age of science to doubt the mystic's vision, for example, as a source of truth, as there is to doubt the dream, as such a source, which the ancients believed in-and a disposition even to doubt the poet's vision and poetry as such a source. There is a feeling that poetry is merely a thing of beauty, of art for the sake of art, and that the true poet does not bother about the truth of his art, but only about its beauty. Certainly the poet does not "bother" about truth; but still the discovery of truth is the result. It is hard to see why anyone should question the mystic's vision as a source of truth, if he looks at the matter broadly enough. There can be no doubt that the imagination of the Hebrews, who saw visions and

dreamed dreams, and of other imaginative peoples who have concerned themselves with religion, the Greeks and the Hindoos, the saints of the middle ages,-have contributed much more to our present store of religious knowledge than has come from the other source; in other words that revelation-for this is the only possible meaning of the word-has given us much more than theology. This would be expected in a subject where the mystery is greatest. Theology has been content mainly to systematize the truth got in the other way.

The reasoner reaches a conclusion which seems to him to agree with fact, external or internal, which therefore has the conscientious approval of mind, and he proclaims this as truth. When the myth or fiction produced by the imaginative mind is interpreted, the interpretation has likewise the approval of the mind, and this is proclaimed as truth also. But this is a subsequent interpretation made by the reason, with which the poetic mind itself is not primarily concerned. The imagination works spontaneously, that is, as far as we can see, without the conscious purpose of producing truth. And furthermore the fiction as it is produced has on the face of it nothing to do with truth; it impresses us rather by its want of correspondence to actuality. But the fiction may have another quality which is apparent, and which if present wins the approval of the mind. Truth in the sphere of reason becomes in the sphere of the imagination beauty: the two are analogous. I shall not attempt a new definition of beauty, but merely suggest that we truly see beauty only in the second mode of thought, and that whatever wins our approval among the products of the second mode of thought, as truth wins it in the first-and in either case we cannot by analysis go much beyond the word approval-that we call beautiful. And further our idea and standard of beauty seem to come from this source; they are established by the productions of the second mode of thought. The agreement between the true and the beautiful has always been recognized-"Beauty is truth," says Keats, "truth beauty"; they are not synonymous only because they belong to the different orders of thought;

they are brother and sister, but not identical. But whenever a fiction of the poetic mind wins us because of its beauty, we may be pretty sure that it embodies an idea which, if we could get it, would win our reasonable approval also. We can only feel the beauty of the fiction; we can perhaps by analysis demonstrate the truth of the idea; but our judgment is as much to be trusted in one case as in the other. We may indeed by a transference of the terms even call the fiction "true," and speak of the truth of poetry. Keats, therefore, is essentially right when he says: "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or not. . . . The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream; he awoke and found it truth."2 Thus the poet dreams and his dream seems idle, but when he awakes he finds there is a rational conception correspondent to it, and this is an addition to knowledge. The poet looks upon that semi-obscurity which I have described as his proper field of vision, and enlightens it. In the process of enlightenment the poet performs the first if not the greatest work.

For purposes of instruction it is doubtless desirable that the poet's vision should be interpreted, that in the poem, concrete in its method, we should discover the abstract meaning which lies behind it, that the poetic beauty should be translated into the truth of reason. This of course is not at all necessary to the enjoyment of poetry, for the true reader of poetry reads, as the poet writes, with vision, and is amply satisfied with its beauty. The translation is not necessary even for instruction, because the mind can receive the truth of the poem without interpretation, imaginatively and unconsciously, as the mind of the poet has imparted it; the thought need nowhere be formulated; the fable is instructive without the moral; and the parables of Christ were edifying even though they were not rationally comprehended. But the inclination of the human mind is finally to interpret, and this is the course of progress. The scientist succeeds to the poet. "The poet picks the flowers," as Silberer expresses it,

1 Compare Coleridge's beautiful "Time, Real and Imaginary." 2 Letters, ed. Forman, 1895, pp. 52, 53.

"1

"without knowing their names, and holds them out to us, to our joy. Then much later comes the botanist who discovers what kind of a plant it really is. What was at first prized merely for its beauty, is now disclosed as a source of knowledge." This then is the relation of poetry and science. Similarly the relation of poetry and criticism is well expressed by W. C. Brownell. "Criticism may not inexactly be described as the statement of the concrete in terms of the abstract. . . . The concrete absorbs the constructive artist whose endeavor is to give substance to his idea, which until expressed is an abstraction. The concern of criticism is to measure his success by the correspondence of his expression to the idea it suggests and by the value of the idea itself." Theory thus certainly justifies not only poetry, but the criticism of poetry as well; though the merit of poetry is quite independent of any critical interpretation. We must indeed beware of supposing that the poet's intuitive thought can always be rationalized. Some deeper portions of poetic truth, particularly those arising from the unconscious mind-which we must now go on to consider―may be entirely incapable of such rationalization, and completely out of the range of the ordinary thought.

1 Jahrbuch, as above, vol. iii, p. 674.

2 Criticism, p. 16.

CHAPTER VI

IN

THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND IN POETRY

I

N the production of poetry the mental operation is partly an unconscious one and draws material partly from unconscious sources. Poetry, as Shelley declares, is "created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man." In the consideration of this unconscious element arise some of the chief difficulties of the subject-difficulties indeed which in the present state of knowledge are insurmountable.

We have found that poetry is produced by a mental operation different from ordinary thought; now we shall find that this operation is often entirely beyond our direct observation. Without this added element there are difficulties enough. It is impossible to use the method of introspection while the mind is engaged in poetic thought, because in dream there can be no observation or judgment. The moment investigation begins the mind is awake, the operation to be observed is over, and one can only try to recall its processes. It is like trying to analyze the processes of a dream. The waking thought and the dream thought belong to different orders. But now, in the second place, we find that the operation runs into a deeper portion of the mind where no recollection and so no direct observation is possible to ordinary thought.

The existence of what I have called the unconscious is often doubted by the ordinary person, for the good reason that in his ordinary thought he knows nothing about it and can recollect

1 Defense of Poetry, p. 7.